Policy-makers skewing ONA intel: ADA

Reporter: Kerry O'Brien

KERRY O'BRIEN: Speaking of the joint parliamentary committee of inquiry into the quality of Australia's intelligence assessments on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction - as we were with Richard Butler just a few minutes ago - that inquiry has received an interesting submission from a number of former intelligence officers with a number of strong criticisms of the peak intelligence agency, the Office of National Assessment.

Written by a working group of retired intelligence officers for the Australian Defence Association (ADA), the submission says too many intelligence analysts with policy-making backgrounds or ambitions have too often supplied assessments biased towards government policy.

Neil James, a defence intelligence officer for more than two decades who also served as a weapons inspector in Iraq and led the first UNSCOM raid on a presidential palace, is the executive director of the ADA, and he joins me now.

You singled out the Office of National Assessment, the ONA for strong criticism.

What do you see as the biggest problems there?

NEIL JAMES, CHIEF EXECUTIVE, AUSTRALIAN DEFENCE ASSOCIATION: In fact we don't single out ONA for the strongest criticism.

We actually believe single out DIO for that.

KERRY O'BRIEN: I'll come to DIO in a minute.

But ONA cops, I think, some fairly serious criticism from you.

Let's start with it.

NEIL JAMES: The main problem with ONA quite frankly was when it was set up in the late 1970s, it was only intended it would handle political and economic intelligence and the DIO would retain the primary responsibility for national level military threat assessments.

For a variety of reasons over the years, ONA slowly taken away a lot of DIO's role in that regard and as we say in our submission, we believe part of the problem that went wrong with the weapons of mass destruction assessment was just that - ONA does haven't the capability to do the level of military assessments that are required by the country.

KERRY O'BRIEN: You say too many of its staff have been ex-journalists or ex-diplomats or policy making backgrounds.

Apart of what you would see as a failure of military expertise, what's the problem with those people?

NEIL JAMES: It depends what you regard the ONA as.

Do you regard it as an intelligence agency in itself that's value adds the other agencies, or is it a clearing house?

The Australia Defence Association submission is really mirroring many criticisms of the ONA over the years.

That there've been too many ex-journalists and ex-diplomats employed there and not enough what we call career intelligence professionals --

KERRY O'BRIEN: What's wrong with too many ex-diplomats?

A lot of those diplomats have worked side by side with intelligence officers overseas.

They are used to assessing intelligence reports.

NEIL JAMES: I think the key word in our assessment was 'too many'.

We're not arguing there shouldn't be a wide variety of people employed at ONA, it's out of balance.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Your reports also singles out the Defence Intelligence Organisation and says, "The current director of the DIO and most of his civilian and military predecessors have not had any experience, education or training in intelligence matters.

"Most of the civilians have with highly unfortunate consequences been policy-makers transferred sideways from other departments or agencies."

And you talk about serious systemic weaknesses.

What are the highly unfortunate consequences?

NEIL JAMES: I don't want to go into personalities.

But certainly the best example that's recent is the East Timor assessments.

The intelligence staff at the deployable joint force headquarters in Brisbane prepared an intelligence estimate predicting with considerable accuracy that the Indonesians were going to lose the referendum in East Timor by a large margin and with quite comprehensive accuracy they predicted what the Indonesians would do.

This assessment went up through the defence force command chain and was blessed at every level.

But when it got to the policy-makers in Canberra many refused to believe it because it went against their own personal prejudices and desires for what they wanted to happen in terms of Australia policy over the East Timor issue.

This isn't a unique situation in Australia.

If you go back to the Yom Kippur war, for instance, exactly the same thing happened.

The Israeli intelligence agencies got it right and the Cabinet refused to believe them.

KERRY O'BRIEN: To the extent that things were wrong in your assessment with the Iraq intelligence, where did it go wrong?

NEIL JAMES: Ironically some of the assessments for Iraq were probably not as badly out of kilter as they have been for some of the other issues we faced in the past.

A bit of that was because Australia was possibility uniquely placed to independently assess some of the Iraqi intelligence, because we contributed such a disproportionate number of senior people to UNSCOM and UNMOVIC over the years that those two missions were in operation.

KERRY O'BRIEN: If your criticisms of ONA and DIO are right, even if the intelligence assessment on the ground were accurate, they might have been affected through ONA.

NEIL JAMES: There's a cultural problem in Australian intelligence agencies if we put anywhere in there, give them a job title of intelligence analyst and expect them to be one.

Now the best analysts are really people who have experience as collectors and that's one reason why the assessments from ASIO and ASIS tend to be better than they are from ONA and DIO because most of the analysts are people with collection experience.

Now the real problem we've got with DIO in particular is that many of the managers are transferred into DIO from outside and with the best will in the world and some of these are really keen and enthusiastic people, they don't quite have the background for the job they have to do.

If they come from a policy-making background, there's a danger that you lose objectivity because they start to - even if only subconsciously - slant the intelligence to what they think Australia should have.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Isn't it true that most of the intelligence with regard to Iraq did come from Britain and America and to the extent that we now know some of that intelligent was flawed, the flaw was in Britain.

Tony Blair talking about a 45-minute build-up to a nuclear attack.

NEIL JAMES: The problem with the 45-minute quote, as I understand it, it was based on a single source.

No professional intelligence officer would allow that type of report to go to senior levels particularly to the prime minister of a country, if the reliability of that piece of information was based on a single source.

You would have to have incredible faith in the reliability of the source and the accuracy of the intelligence to do that.

I believe probably in this case that 45-minute quote shouldn't have got where it got.

KERRY O'BRIEN: From your own experience and knowledge and as one of the authors of this submission, do you believe you're reflecting a widespread view in the intelligence community in Australia?

NEIL JAMES: I'd have to say the Australian Defence Association consulted widely in the drawing up of this submission and it was based also on many conversations that people have had at various interagency meetings over the years.

The main thrust of the submission would be widely supported, particularly at desk, analyst level, across all five or six intelligence agencies.

It won't be well received by some of, the dare I say it, less qualified managers because they will take it personally.

It's not a personal attack on them but on the culture and structure which has produced this problem.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Neil James, thanks for talking with us.

Transcripts on this website are created by an independent transcription service. The ABC does not warrant the accuracy of the transcripts.